Let's see now.... The budget deficit is out of control. Bird flu is threatening a horrific pandemic. The Iraq war is growing in horrors every day. The ice caps are melting. The poor are getting poorer, and so are the middle class. Massive numbers of Americans have no healthcare.

And the Republicans are working up Constitutional Amendments to keep them from turning gay or "desecrating" the flag.

Let's start with the homophobia. Given the parade of self-righteous God Gay-fearing GOP heterogogues who've turned out to be gay, and the strange and malicious Skinner-phillic methods wingnuts employ in attempts to control the gayness within -- and you really must see this watch-me-hug-a-man-and-not-get-an-erection demonstration of "curing" homosexuality through the use of same-sex hugging -- methinks that, when it comes to right-wing leaders, the phobia of homo is less a fear of other gays and more a fear of the homosexual feelings within themselves.

"Curing" each other of gayness is a flourishing cottage industry in Christianist circles.

My message to these sanctimonious types who fear gay marriage would take away the sanctity of their marriages: If your marriage is so fragile that it is threatened because of the mere legality of your being able to divorce your spouse and enter into a gay marriage, then I'd say you have some serious issues in your personal life and should not turn to the Federal Government in some desperate attempt to make your gay feelings unconstitutional.

Of course, they'd say they're only exercising their first amendment rights. Silly people! Don't you know President Bush has already outlawed the first amendment? (Freedom to protest is something America advocates only for China and Russia.)

At least these Republicans have their priorities, um, straight and have, er, come out to reveal that their #1 priority is not addressing the serious business of this nation but rather cultivating fear and hate in their base in desperate attempts to get elected, again, by dividing and conquering.

No one should be surprised to hear that there's a whole lot the matter with Texas, or that -- as is the case even in religion-driven politics â€“ the root of our state's particular evil can be traced to the love of money. Here in Texas, rich men who hand money out by the bucketload are using their wealth to buy a state government that looks like their vision of the promised land.

I don't know if this has been posted here yet, but I thought I'd pass it along as it is the most frightening information I've seen in months.

From Savage Love (Dan Savage):

STRAIGHT RIGHTS UPDATE: After tossing nearly half of last week's column away on a straight rights update, it was my intention to give it a rest. In fact, every time I write one of these I think, "Banning abortion, evicting unmarried straight couples and their children, moving to ban birth controlâ€”things can't get any worse, can they?" Oh, but they can: Not satisfied with meddling in the lives of the relatively small percentage of women who are pregnant, the American Taliban is moving to regulate the lives of all American women.

"New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselvesâ€”and to be treated by the health-care systemâ€”as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon," reports the Washington Post. "[T]his means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control... [I]t's important that women follow this advice throughout their reproductive lives, because about half of pregnancies are unplanned and so much damage can be done to a fetus between conception and the time the pregnancy is confirmed."

Color me paranoid, but ordering American women to regard themselves as "pre-pregnant" because they may harm a fetus they don't know they're carrying opens the door to prosecuting women who harm their fetuses by failing to regard themselves as "pre-pregnant." How long until "women should... refrain from smoking [and] maintain a healthy body weight" becomes "women must..." Does that sound paranoid? Well, so did a war on contraception once.

Oddly enough, Bush's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't urge straight men to regard themselves as existing in a perpetual state of "pre-fatherhood." Smoking, obesity, asthma, and diabetes could seriously hamper a man's ability to do the heavy lifting that comes with fatherhood. But Bush's CDC doesn't seem that interested in regulating the behavior of all those fat, smoking pre-fathers out there.

Gee. Isn't. That. Weird.

There is a bright side in the CDC's announcement: If we're going to regard all females as pre-pregnant, then we can, as my friend Gomez points out, regard all virgins as merely pre-fucked.

The Republicans have done it again. While they spend the nation into bankruptcy while neglecting the critical challenges that we face -- porous national security, politicizing intelligence, declining education, a broken healthcare system -- they rush into this election year whipping up fear over trivialities and appealing to depraved and reactionary emotionalism.

"We are trying to make an assimilation statement," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of two dozen senators who voted Thursday for both English proposals.Given his past, Mr. Graham seem to intend for everyone to submit to his arch-conservative views.

"What the president has said all along is that he wants to make sure that people who become American citizens have a command of the English language," Snow said. "It's as simple as that."Of course, the president demonstrates poor "command of the English language" himself. But we have to remember, he's above the law. He says so over and over again.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., disputed charges that making English the national language was racist or aimed at Spanish speakers.Sure. It's just a coincidence that this measure is taken up at the same time they're working up other nativist laws and policies directed against Hispanics crossing the Mexican border. Mr. Inhofe's real beef is with waiters in Chinese restaurants.

The provision makes exceptions for any language assistance already guaranteed by law, such as bilingual ballots required under the Voting Rights Act or court interpreters. It also requires immigrants seeking citizenship to demonstrate a "sufficient understanding of the English language for usage in every day life."Let's see if we can come up with a list of phrases....

I wonder where the self-labeled "pro-life" folks are on this one -- especially since politically they're centered in the GOP, the party that has fought for decades against any sort of universal healthcare.

Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia's rate is 6 per 1,000.

"We are the wealthiest country in the world, but there are still pockets of our population who are not getting the health care they need," said Mary Beth Powers, a reproductive health adviser for the U.S.-based Save the Children, which compiled the rankings based on health data from countries and agencies worldwide.

The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world.

Oh. Maybe that explains it?

The Republicans have been big on fomenting the attitude that if people are down and out, then somehow they just deserve it. Anyone who's poor just doesn't work hard enough, is just too damned lazy, right? That's why they oppose the kinds of Christian acts I learned in Sunday school, like aid for the poor. We don't want to coddle "those people"!

And so, following the logic of the GOP -- the party of forced pregnancy in the name of "pro-life" -- these babies who are dying just have it coming. They die because they deserve it. Right?

Of course, I don't expect much of anything on this from the forced-pregnancy advocates on this one, except perhaps to respond to criticism like this. After all, in all their self-proclaimed advocacy for "babies," they really don't show much interest in babies themselves, only in embryos and fetuses and even unfertilized ova. That and the health of the insurance companies and pharmaceutical conglomerates (who are profiting quite well, thank you).

Still, it's the impoverished nations that feel the full brunt of infant mortality, since they account for 99 percent of the 4 million annual deaths of babies in their first month. Only about 16,000 of those are in the United States, according to Save the Children.

The highest rates globally were in Africa and South Asia. With a newborn death rate of 65 out of 1,000 live births, Liberia ranked the worst.

Ah, there's another reason for the right wing not to give a crap: this is "other people's problems." While we have the Global Gag Rule in place in order to appease the oh-so-ironically-labeled "pro-life" folks with an inside track to our rulers, the death of real, actual, breathing, physically autonomous babies -- the kind that are born, the kind that are persons, the kind that are here, now -- is not a matter of import to them.

In past reports by Save the Children â€” released ahead of Mother's Day â€” U.S. mothers' well-being has consistently ranked far ahead of those in developing countries but poorly among industrialized nations. This year the United States tied for last place with the United Kingdom on indicators including mortality risks and contraception use.

More unimportant news to the radical right politicians, who seem to be in an all-out foot race to outdo each other with misogynist laws that force pregnancy on women, no matter what. No, to them, what matters most is what is inside women's wombs -- not the women, and not babies.

And thus the ongoing tragedy of declining healthcare in this country continues, while any and all attempts to change that are met by the Republicans with intransigence, denial, outright hostility, lies, political scapegoatism -- remember how "welfare mothers" were supposedly destroying America? -- and healthy doses of self-righteousness.

And that's why, year after year, we can expect more Save the Children reports like this one. I don't know if the Democrats have any real answers -- the best Democratic speech I've ever heard on it was delivered by the fictional Matt Santos from The West Wing -- but we can be pretty damned sure that the Republicans will do nothing about it.